Drought-stricken São Paulo battles mosquitoes and dengue fever outbreak – ‘It’s worrying now because it’s hard to control how people store water’

By Rogerio Jelmayer and Loretta Chao  3 March 2015 SÃO PAULO, Brazil (Wall Street Journal) – Inhabitants of this megacity, suffering through the worst drought in decades, have unwittingly contributed to an outbreak of dengue fever by storing scarce water in open containers. The tropical mosquito-borne virus, which often results in high fever, intense muscle […]

Drought-stricken São Paulo hit by floods, but little help for water reservoirs

By Everton Fox 26 February 2015 (Al Jazeera) – Downpours have wreaked havoc across São Paulo, causing widespread flooding. Almost 100mm of rain fell in little over an hour on Wednesday, turning streets and avenues into rivers. São Paulo’s Emergency Management Centre recorded 96mm of rain in just 60 minutes. Dozens of cars were submerged, […]

Farming now worse for climate than clearing forests

By John Upton3 February 2015 (Climate Central) – Efforts to restrain deforestation are working, which means pollution from farming has increased in importance. The federal raids in Alta Floresta, Brazil surprised locals in 2005. The year before, nearly 60,000 acres of rainforest had been torn out of the municipality. Now farmers and loggers were being […]

Deforestation in Brazilian Amazon increased by more than 200 percent in previous 6 months; forest degradation increased by more than 700 percent

By Antônio Fonseca,  Carlos Souza Jr., and Adalberto Veríssimo23 February 2015 (Imazon) – […] In January 2015, 288 square kilometers of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon were detected by SAD. That represents a 169% increase in relation to January 2014 when deforestation totaled 107 square kilometers. In January 2015, deforestation was concentrated in Mato Grosso […]

Image of the Day: ‘Welcome to the Cantareira desert’

15 January 2015 (EPA) – A message in graffiti which reads ‘Welcome to the Cantareira desert’ is written on a car which was once submerged in water, at the Atibainha dam, part of the Cantareira System, which shows lowest levels of water, in Nazare Paulista city, 90km away from Sao Paulo, Brazil, 15 January 2015. […]

Brazil drought prompts drastic measures to save water – ‘São Paulo was known as the drizzle city. Now it’s kind of a desert.’

By Lourdes Garcia-Navarro10 February 2015 (NPR) – Last Sunday, hundreds of Paulistanos, as the residents of São Paulo are known, dressed up and danced on the streets at one of the dozens of block parties that happen in advance of the annual celebration known as Carnival. Except this year – among the pirates and Viking […]

Video: Loggers chop down tree with koala family still in it

[Sadly, this is very common: Deforestation in Australia killing and mutilating koalas – Loggers say finding dead koalas is ‘like a daily thing, sometimes a couple every hour’ –Des] By Stephen Messenger4 February 2015 (The Dodo) – A distressing new video shows a gum tree being felled by loggers while a koala and her baby […]

Despite green promise, Indonesia timber company continues to destroy forests – ‘They are simply implementing business as usual’

By Rhett A. Butler3 February 2015 (mongabay.com) – A year after it pledged a dramatic shift in how it operates in Indonesia’s fast dwindling native habitats, Asia Pacific Resources International Ltd (APRIL) continues to destroy forests and peatlands in Sumatra, allege environmentalists. On January 28th, 2014 — just days before APRIL’s biggest competitor Asia Pulp […]

Panda habitat threatened by recent forest tenure reforms in China

By Apoorva Joshi27 January 2015 (mongabay.com) – Since the 1950s, plantations and second-growth forests in China have been locally managed by village communities as collective forests, which today account for 58 percent of China’s forestland. Many of these collective forests lie within mountainous rural areas, some of which are also home to the 1,600 or […]

Drought may force Brazil’s biggest city to cut back water service to 2 days a week – ‘The water is at its end, our patience too’

São Paulo, January 28, 2015 (Associated Press) –  The worst drought to hit Brazil’s biggest city in decades may leave residents with water service only two days a week. São Paulo water utility company Sabesp says a five days-off, two days-on system would be a last-ditch effort to prevent the collapse of the Cantareira water […]

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